Folks, I hope you’ll excuse the next couple of days being pretty quiet around these parts, but I’ve a whole raft of non-Futurismic work to get sorted this week, plus a few bits of housekeeping here as well… and dropping a few days worth of blogging will mean I can get everything done without the need for a modafinil overdose (let alone being lynched by my patient yet long-suffering girlfriend).
Back to business as usual on Wednesday – thanks for your patience! 🙂
Ars Technica points us to a BBC report that claims botnets are increasingly being deployed by ideological and political activist groups as well as the more traditional spammers ‘n’ scammers. There’s undoubtedly a kernel of truth here, but given that the data that informs this conclusion comes from Prolexic, a company whose profits depend on selling computer security solutions to businesses and governments, I find myself wanting to poke holes in the story. It’s easily done, too.
First of all, Anonymous are described as an “anti-Scientology group”, which is a massive oversimplification. If they can be said to be anything at all, Anonymous is an amorphous and capricious cloud of nihilistic pranksters, but framing them as a single-interest group makes them more understandable to the corporate mind-set, as well as portraying them as “something that could happen to you“.
Next item – look at this excerpt:
In one attack both large and small perfume firms were hit in an apparent attempt, said Mr Sop, by green activists to express their disquiet with the way the companies made and tested their products.
[…]
These techniques are far removed from those favoured by organised criminals. Some targeted databases behind a website in a bid to swamp that with bogus login attempts or lengthy search requests that would knock out the server and take out the website too.
Note the use of “apparent”, and the lack of any defined enemy. They have no idea who did it, in other words; the “green activists” thing is likely a guess, one that plays into current fears about ideological activism by companies whose business practices might put them in line for such. Isn’t it at least equally likely that the botnet was hired by another perfume business in order to throw some caltrops in the path of its competitors? Is it so implausible that “organised criminals” could have upped their technological game in recent months? It’s not an area in which I have great experience (or, indeed, any experience at all), but I’d imagine that staying on top in the world of international gangsterism involves making sure you’re using the best tools available… because if you’re not, your competition surely will be.
Furthermore, how many “green” activist groups with a special interest in perfumery have the spare money to waste on this sort of warfare? A big part of activist psychology is the desire to be seen to be doing something; this sort of clandestine skulduggery doesn’t sound like the work of placard-waving protesters to me, and I doubt they’d have the money or contacts to call down the botnet fist-of-god on their enemies. There’s nothing to say it couldn’t be, of course, but I’d want better proof – especially from a source who stands to benefit from setting up straw-man opponents which it can then offer protection from.
A few more bits from the bottom:
Mr Sop said Prolexic suspected that some of the attacks it had seen in recent months were being mounted by governments or their proxies in the hacking community as a way to demonstrate their cyber capabilities.
*cough* *wink* China *nudge* *cough* The Red Peril! The Other! The monsters under Western capitalism’s bed! They’re coming for you!
The resources being put into the attacks, some of which targeted very expensive pieces of net hardware, ruled out the involvement of organised crime, he said.
Really? Why would organised criminal syndicates not be interested in attacking “expensive net hardware” when political or ideological activists would be? And this hardware – what is so different about it that makes it expensive by comparison to “not-so-expensive” net hardware, exactly? Are the victim servers plated with gold, perhaps?
OK, so I’m going a bit overboard here, but everything about the report from these Prolexic people stinks of under-the-radar button-pushing infomercial. Ideologically-targetted botnets are certainly a real issue, and probably more so than they were a year ago… but I suspect this shift in PR focus by security firms to be born of the realisation that defined threats enable sales better than amorphous ones. Which is the more tangible risk, as perceived by a CEO – “scammers might hijack your server because it’s essentially a box that can do anything if instructed properly” or “people who object to your ideology or business practices could treat your network infrastructure as a weak point”? The former is a statistical long-shot; the latter plays on the fear of competition that is key to any successful business.
Getting back to the core point, though, the rise of ideological deployments of botnets is hardly surprising. The people who run botnets are mercenaries of the old school, renting out their services by the day (or maybe even by the hour) to anyone who can meet the price… and for those groups who can’t meet the price (or don’t like dealing with middle-men), it’s depressingly easy to build one yourself, if you’ve the time and motivation. But that’s the key – time and motivation, and the afore-mentioned visibility. Single-issue activist groups want their protests to be seen and attributed to them, because otherwise they’re wasting their time; the stealthy anonymous attacks are logically far more likely to originate from corporations (legitimate or criminal) and nation-states.
So, yes, ideological cyberwarfare is a real and rising threat… but I’m not convinced it’s as grass-roots a threat as it’s being portrayed. After all, if you want to sell your product to corporations and governments, you can’t go demonising your potential customers in your ad copy.
Wrong… unless those 40,000 words they text out over a month don’t count [via LifeHacker; image by nate steiner].
Sure, a lot of those texts will be rote replies and simple questions, but the point stands: teenagers communicate heavily using a form of the written word. When I was a teenager in the nineties I used to write a lot of letters, but I’d be very surprised if I approached a tenth of that wordcount, which equates to the lower limit for a novel (or at least it used to). Text has a lower bandwidth than face-to-face speech, but SMS messages have the advantage of asynchronicity over a regular phone call, and as gnomic as the compressed words and pseudo-1337 of text messages may be to us older folk, they have the same capability for hidden meaning and word-play as “proper” writing.
Where am I going with this? I’m not sure, to be honest… but I’m increasingly convinced that blaming technologised teen lifestyles for their perceived disinterest in reading is a fiction born of contempt and generational differences. The “cellphone novel” is a popular format in Japan – has anyone really tried pushing it here in the West? Or will we need to wait for that generation to grow its own stars and mavens organically without the help of old-media gatekeepers?
Pop-transhumanist organ H+ Magazine assigned a handful of writers to quiz AI experts at last year’s Artificial General Intelligence Conference, in order to discover how long they expect we’ll have to wait before we achieve human-equivalent intelligence in machines, what sort of level AGI will peak out at, and what AGI systems will look and/or act like, should they ever come into being.
It’s not a huge sample, to be honest – 21 respondants, of whom all but four are actively engaged in AI-related research. But then AGI isn’t a vastly populous field of endeavour, and who better to ask about its future than the people in the trenches?
The diagram below shows a plot of their estimated arrival dates for a selection of AGI milestones:
The gap in the middle is interesting; it implies that the basic split is between those who see AGI happening in the fairly near future, and those who see it never happening at all. Pop on over to the article for more analysis.
The supplementary questions are more interesting, at least to me, because they involve sf-style speculation. For instance:
… we focused on the “Turing test” milestone specifically, and we asked the experts to think about three possible scenarios for the development of human-level AGI: if the first AGI that can pass the Turing test is created by an open source project, the United States military, or a private company focused on commercial profit. For each of these three scenarios, we asked them to estimate the probability of a negative-to-humanity outcome if an AGI passes the Turing test. Here the opinions diverged wildly. Four experts estimated a greater than 60% chance of a negative outcome, regardless of the development scenario. Only four experts gave the same estimate for all three development scenarios; the rest of the experts reported different estimates of which development scenarios were more likely to bring a negative outcome. Several experts were more concerned about the risk from AGI itself, whereas others were more concerned that humans who controlled it could misuse AGI.
If you follow the transhumanist/AGI blogosphere at all, you’ll know that the friendly/unfriendly debate is one of the more persistent bones of contention; see Michael Anissimov’s recent post for some of the common arguments against the likelihood of friendly behaviour from superhuman AGIs, for instance. But even if we write off that omega point and consider less drastic achievements, AGI could be quite the grenade in the punchbowl:
Several experts noted potential impacts of AGI other than the catastrophic. One predicted “in thirty years, it is likely that virtually all the intellectual work that is done by trained human beings such as doctors, lawyers, scientists, or programmers, can be done by computers for pennies an hour. It is also likely that with AGI the cost of capable robots will drop, drastically decreasing the value of physical labor. Thus, AGI is likely to eliminate almost all of today’s decently paying jobs.” This would be disruptive, but not necessarily bad. Another expert thought that, “societies could accept and promote the idea that AGI is mankind’s greatest invention, providing great wealth, great health, and early access to a long and pleasant retirement for everyone.” Indeed, the experts’ comments suggested that the potential for this sort of positive outcome is a core motivator for much AGI research.
No surprise to see a positive (almost utopian) gloss on such predictions, given their sources; scientists need that optimism to propel them through the tedium of research…. which means it’s down to the rest of us to think of the more mundane hazards and cultural impacts of AGI, should it ever arrive.
So here’s a starter for you: one thing that doesn’t crop up at all in that article is any discussion of AGIs as cult figureheads or full-blown religious leaders (by their own intent or otherwise). Given the fannish/cultish behaviour that software and hardware can provoke (Apple /Linux/AR evangelists, I’m looking at you), I’d say the social impact of even a relatively dim AGI is going to a force to be reckoned with… and it comes with a built-in funding model, too.
Terminator-esque dystopias aside, how do you think Artificial General Intelligence will change the world, if at all?
File under “inventions that I’m rather surprised to find didn’t exist already”: modular military encampment armour [via BLDGBLOG; image borrowed from linked article].
… an armored wall system known as McCurdy’s Armor could have Marines rapidly erecting 6.5-foot-tall mortar-, RPG- and bullet proof fortresses in less than an hour, saving the days it can take to fortify an area by conventional means and making forward-operating units more nimble.
Named for Ryan S. McCurdy—a Marine killed in Iraq in 2006 while hauling a wounded comrade to safety—the system is designed to offer troops increased protection and mobility when setting up outposts in hostile areas. The walls can be ferried into place in panels that are easily stackable in a truck or trailer. Once in position, four Marines can assemble a single panel in less than ten minutes without any special tools or additional equipment. The panels then snap together like bomb-proofed Legos secured with steel pins to form a blast- and bullet-proof shelter.
Neat idea. Also an easily-copied technology; given its lo-fidelity nature, budget clones (weaker armour, cheaper materials) of this stuff will pop up everywhere and anywhere there’s a use for it.
Also easily re-used by one’s opponent; likely to dot post-conflict landscapes for years to come, be repurposed as housing material or weld-on armour for vehicles. The street – or the valley, or the high pass, or the desert – finds its own use for things. What would you use it for?